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Hendricks' was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Her parents were a coal-truck driver from LaGrange, Georgia and a domestic cook from adjacent Chambers County, Alabama. She and her sister both attended Ullman High School but Lola graduated from A. H. Parker High School in Birmingham. Lola then went on to study for two years at the Booker T. Washington Business College. She then took a job in a black-owned insurance company, married Joe Hendricks, and moved to the middle-class African-American neighborhood of Titusville in the segregated city.[2]

In the Spring of 1963, Hendricks coordinated the practical office requirements and cultivated local contacts for the combined efforts of the ACMHR and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which Shuttlesworth had co-founded and which was chaired by Martin Luther King, Jr.. She worked directly with the SCLC's Wyatt Walker during the campaign, helping organize support and logistics for marches and department store boycotts.[1]

It was Hendricks who applied directly to Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor for a parade permit for the first day of marches and was told "You will not get a permit in Birmingham, Alabama to picket. I'll picket you over to the jail."[3] At Walker's urging she did not actively demonstrate and risk jailing, protecting her behind-the-scenes importance to the movement. Hendricks' nine-year-old daughter, Audrey Hendricks (1952–2009), however, was the only child in her class to participate in the May 2, 1963 "Children's Crusade" that brought national attention to Connor's brutal tactics against demonstrators. She spent five nights in jail as minders got word out to her parents that she was safe.[4]